The medical group practice of UTHealth Medical School, UT Physicians has more than 900 physicians certified in 80 medical specialties and subspecialties and provides multi-specialty care for the entire family.

Signal Transduction in Cancer

The workshop will highlight novel approaches for drug discovery and the development of anti-cancer therapeutics, based on understanding the molecular mechanisms of aberrant signal transduction; a hallmark of oncogenesis.

We will consider how and why there is a renewed focus on Ras proteins as promising targets for drug discovery, despite the view for many years that Ras was “undruggable”.

We will discuss the potential role of dynamics and membrane binding for the design of Ras inhibitors and highlight the need for combining computational structural biology with biophysical and biological assays.

Harold Varmus recently identified K-Ras as a cancer target of special merit; we will consider why, and how to approach the design of K-Ras-specific inhibitors.

There is a critical need to find drugs that are effective against cancer metastasis. To address this need, we can take a genomic approach to reposition drugs that are effective against metastatic cells. By adopting such a strategy, we can readily identify inhibitors of stem cell phenotypes, and show how they target a novel and clinically relevant pathway that drives metastasis in breast cancer. Wnt signaling plays vital roles in development and the self-renewal of stem cells. It is also dysregulated in nearly every type of solid tumor, particularly so in colon cancer. Recent progress in the understanding of novel modulators of Wnt signaling in the regulation of colon and lung cancer will be discussed.